The Three Impostors

Machen (1863-1947) was a Welsh mystic and author of the 1890s and early 20th century best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1894) is considered a classic of horror with Stephen King claiming it to be "maybe the best ... in the English language," and his WWI short story The Bowmen, widely read as fact, created the legend of The Angels of Mons. He first gained a literary reputation for his stories published in literary magazines from 1890, his gothic and fantastic themes fitting into the growing aesthetic movement of the time. However, following the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde in 1895 he encountered difficulty in finding publishers for his works of decadent horror. The 1920s saw a revival of Machen's literary fortunes with the publication of his final masterpiece The Secret Glory (1922), his autobiography Far Off Things, and new editions of his English translation of Casanova's Memoirs, but by 1926 the boom in republications was almost over and his income dropped. His financial difficulties were finally ended by a literary appeal in recognition of his stature as a distinguished man of letters which was launched in 1943 to mark his 80th birthday, backed by names such as T S Eliot, George Bernard Shaw and John Masefield. The Three Impostors: or, The Transmutations is an episodic horror novel first published in 1895 comprised of several weird tales which culminates in a final denouement of deadly horror. The three impostors of the title are members of a secret society devoted to debauched pagan rites who weave a web of deception in the streets of London, relating the aforesaid weird tales in the process, as they search for a missing Roman coin commemorating an infamous orgy of the Emperor Tiberius and close in on their prey: 'the young man with spectacles'. Machen's publisher John Lane had initially asked him to expurgate the manuscript which he refused to do, but he did eventually agree to revise the final scene in order to purge one word that Lane had considered too explicit - that word being 'entrails'. A number of the stories which make up the novel have subsequently appeared individually in various anthologies.